Avuzestel – Dwarf Fortress
644 words.
I created a new world called Emeecamo, “The Eternal Universes.” I used all the default settings except I set the mineral occurrence to “Frequent” because I’m a filthy casual and I don’t like looking all over creation for metals.
Unlike my last world, which was dominated by humans, Emeecamo has a fairly balanced population between all the races, and almost all of them are at war with the goblins. All but the dwarves, oddly enough.
Yikes, that's a lot of goblins and trolls right there.
I picked a spot and started. The first year in Avuzestel passed fairly uneventfully, other than occasional irritation from buzzard attacks. I wanted to experiment with above-ground buildings, so I had the dwarves build a two-story tower on the surface to protect the wagon and give them a place to sleep and eat. I learned very quickly that building two-story structures on the surface is a real pain, so then I had the dwarves mine down into the earth to build the rest of their fortress.
In the second year, the goblins arrived. A small scout force of a half-dozen archers at first. Having little or no military yet, I locked the dwarves underground and the goblins proceeded to kill all the animals left in the pasture on the surface. After sating their blood lust, they left.
I tried to build some fortifications on the second level of my tower structure so I could shoot out at the goblins, but it failed completely. So I had to watch helplessly when another small force of goblin archers returned in the third year to mutilate my animals again.
To prepare for the fourth year, I enclosed my pastures in fences, and revised and improved my tower fortifications so I could assemble my marksdwarves on the roof to shoot down at invaders. I was sure I was ready for the next round of goblin scouts.
On the third day of the fourth year, well before I expected them, the vile force of darkness returned. Only this time, it was more than a half dozen scouts. It was a massive seething army of goblins, beak dogs, and trolls, numbering at least a hundred. There was even a dwarf in their midst! A traitorous dwarf, captured and brainwashed to fight his own kind.
My markdwarf emplacement on the roof failed again (this time, I think my dwarves didn’t have any ammo). Not that it would have mattered. The trolls broke down the front doors and the goblin army swarmed into my fortress, killing every living thing inside. My fledgling military squads put up a brave fight at the doors, but they were quickly overwhelmed. And that was the end of Avuzestel.
But the Massacre At Avuzestel will not be forgotten! No more will the dwarves of the Systemic Tool sit out this war against the goblins. They must be stopped! Already the elder dwarves back in the Mountainhomes have sent out another expedition to build another fortress. This new fortress has but one purpose: Vengeance!
I have to admit, part of the fun I am deriving from playing Dwarf Fortress is in creating source material to feed into my video rendering scripts. I’ve continued to tweak and iterate them so that it’s really easy to assemble video clips I record from OBS into a final, rendered video with the push of a button. It’s an additional challenge to cut out the drudgery of the game mechanics, leaving just the action-packed highlights while maintaining some kind of narrative arc for the life of the fortress. So because I put a fair amount of work into these, here are the four videos I made of the rise and fall of Avuzastel:
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